A call to freshen up

Nov. 30, 2012

Written by

Jeff Baker

Free Press Columnist

It’s 5 o’clock on a Friday. This week was brutal with projects and deadlines. You’re stoked to be walking out of the office and plan on hitting up the beer shop on the way home. While walking up and down the plentiful beer aisles you spot a new Pilsner from your favorite West Coast brewery and your decision is made.

You get home, pour it in the glass and take a sip ... hum. Well, it kinda tastes blah. The hops aren’t as prominent as you thought and there’s a little cardboard-like flavor. This beer was brand-new at the shop, so how could it be bad? You check the bottle to see if there’s a packing date or any sort of freshness code. Nope. Nothing. Not even a batch number.

Sound familiar? I can’t tell you how many times in my career I’ve had this happen to me or my customers. It’s frustrating as a consumer when there’s no way for you to tell when the beer was brewed and there’s no recourse when contacting the brewery to alert them about old beer.

I’ve been a proponent of bottle dating for a long time, starting countless discussions (read: arguments) on BeerAdvocate.com and RateBeer.com. Beer is a food product and therefore should be treated as such. And since most beers are best when released from the brewery, consumers should have a way to tell how fresh they are.

It seems so obvious that beer should have some sort of date code, so what’s the problem? There’s a few issues at play from a brewer’s standpoint.

First, installing a bottle dating machine can pose as a costly endeavor for small breweries. I feel for the little guy, but I think if you’re going to regularly bottle your beers this should be viewed as a standard operating cost, not an option.

Next, brewers all have their own opinion about how long their beer stays fresh. This sparks the debate about whether to use “bottled on” dating or “best before” dating. If you use “bottled on,” there can be confusion about how long the beer will taste good. If you use “best before,” a customer has no idea how long the code length is. For example, a lot of European imports have a “best before” date that’s one year from the packaging date while most American breweries operate with 120 days.

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Lastly, breweries are pressured by wholesalers and distributors to either leave off the date codes or use obscure batch codes so that they won’t have to pick up expired product as often from retailers. This reason is inexcusable, in my opinion, and it leads to over-ordering and a lot of bad beer in the market.

A lot of breweries have been jumping on board with accessible date coding and I applaud their efforts. Long Trail Brewing has been a frontrunner in the local market. Breweries like Stone (California) have gone so far as to release beers with names like “Enjoy By 12/21/12 IPA.”

I’d like to see more breweries start to use a combination of a “born on” or “bottled on” date with a suggested length of freshness. I’m not one to laud the practices of Anheuser-Busch InBev, but I’ll give credit where credit’s due. Budweiser has long been the king of this, stating on its labels “Freshest Taste within 110 days (of) Born On date.” I’d like to be the judge of how long a beer stays fresh and to do that I need to know when it was bottled.